UniFi: Bye-bye Mikrotik … we hardly knew you.

There was a flash of lightning today, and next thing I knew was my UniFI internet was down, and so was my IPTV. Huh? Fiber optic shouldn’t be affected by lightning, what’s all this? Went downstairs to check and my Mikrotik Managed switch had no lights on.

Got out the multimeter and there was voltage on the power supply, which meant the unit itself is dead.

*cry*

Checked out the other equipment, and it seems my TM fiber box is partially knocked out too, the fiber and ethernet ports still work, but the telephone ports are gone. TEL1 won’t go off hook, and TEL2 is always on hook.

I managed to bring the internet up again by digging out the D-Link router that TM supplied and setting that up in bridged mode. Fixing phone service will need TM to come over and do something about the fiber gateway.

*cry* *cry* *cry*

It’ll take a few weeks to source a replacement mikrotik. Since I do have an always-on PC in my living room running MythTV server anyway, maybe I should get that to work as a vlan tagging router/firewall instead, in which case I will not need a mikrotik, nor will I make use of my excellent Buffalo router (except as a WIFI AP). It is less number of gadgets to depend on, but then again, having too many things in one big gadget is not a good idea too.

Too much to deal with this weekend.

MORAL OF THE STORY:

Yes, you may have fiber coming into your house, but there are other sources of surges around as well. This probably came in from the power line, or the ethernet line in my living room or the line from my alarm system (most likely). I used to have cal-lab surge protectors all over the place but some had gone faulty and I had temporarily bypassed them.

This post was originally published as a Facebook Note at 2010-10-24 00:39:46 +0800.